This Nonprofit Organization Helps Girls in One of Nairobi's Poorest Areas Stay in School by Giving Them Reusable Maxi-Pads

While I was in Nairobi a couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to visit the Huru International center in Mukuru, one of the city's biggest slums, home to an estimated 600,000 people.

In Mukuru, a sprawling urban shanty town, most girls and women do not have access to sanitary supplies—things like maxi-pads and tampons that we may take for granted in our own lives. This means that not only are girls and teenagers often finding unclean and dangerous substitutes for sanitary napkins during menstruation, but they are also missing up to a week of school every single month—12 weeks a year—because they can't go to school while they're having their periods.

Enter Huru International, an organization founded in 2008 by by Lorna Macleod, Executive Director of Micato Safari's AmericaShare nonprofit arm and Johnson & Johnson, which is dedicated to providing thousands of girls with free kits—filled with reusable (washable!) sanitary pads, underwear, soap, and HIV/AIDS-prevention information.

I was lucky enough to stop by a production center to see how the Huru kits are made—and even got to sit in on a class where a brilliant teacher talked girls through how to use the sanitary pads and gave them some seriously life-affirming pep talks too. Check it out.

The Huru kits are all about the reusable pads—each kit contains five standard-size pads and three extra-long overnight pads, three pairs of panties, a sturdy ziplock bag, and a big bar of soap. The pads start out as super-absorbent towel-type sheets (top), which are hand-trimmed to the correct sizes. Here's a stack of trimmed pads:

To prevent the edges from fraying, they're hemmed and a Huru tag is affixed.

And the final kit:

After we checked out the production process, we headed out to see a class. Here's one of the pamphlets that gets distributed to the teens when they get their Huru kits:

And the teacher demonstrating the difference between the pads and showing the girls how to affix them to the panties.

I took the Huru International tour with a really good guy friend of mine—and his reactions to the whole thing were amazing. When the teacher demonstrated how to affix the pad to the panties by snapping the buttons underneath the crotch panel, his face lit up and was like: "Wow! So that's what the wings and snaps are for! I really didn't know!"

So I looked at him and was, like, "What do you mean? What do you think those wings are for in maxi-pad commercials at home?"

And he replied, totally straight-faced: "I thought women stuck the wings to their thighs."

Yup. Men. Glad there was enlightening all around that day.

I was really impressed with what Huru International does for the young women's community in Mukuru. It's a great example of a grassroots charity identifying an everyday need and finding a practical and education-based solution for it. You can learn more about Huru International here.